Is “Taiwan” a psychoanalytic creation?

ABSTRACT

The rise of Taiwanese nationalism in the late 1980s and early 1990s that rapidly, radically, but “peacefully” replaced Chinese nationalism to become the hegemonic discourse in two decades is a political “miracle.” My paper argues that this compressed political transformation would not have been possible without the help of psychoanalytic discourse mediated by critical theory in the activist and critical intellectual circles. In the context of the (post-) Cold War era, there was a peculiar form of decolonization equated with de-Sinicization. At stake is a translational concept that itself becomes untranslatable: zhu-ti-xing, the Chinese word for subjectivity. By analyzing the conflicts within the Chinese-speaking activists and intellectuals in the United States and in Taiwan, I will demonstrate in this paper the ways in which the Lacanian idea of the subject as having a lack becomes a critical tool for the advocates for the independence of Taiwan to break through the existing discursive inertia and to effectively make Taiwan a nation without essence, a nation of zhu-ti-xing/subjectivity, and to facilitate the fitting of this new hegemony into the ideology of Pax Americana.

KEYWORDS:

• Taiwan
• Chinese
• Cold War
• nationalism
• decolonization
• critical theory
• Lacanian psychoanalysis
• subjectivity

Notes

1 The French translation of this paper is published in 2023 in Psychanalyse du Reste du Monde: Un Atlas Critique du Freudisme [Psychoanalysis and the Rest of the World: A Critical Atlas of Freudianism], edited by Livio Boni and Sophie Mendelsohn.

2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwan (accessed on 22 June 2022)

3 In March 2019, the Department of Foreign Languages and Literature, National Taiwan University, held a conference for Liao Chao-yang’s retirement. Young scholars from cultural studies, comparative literature, and English literature presented their work to honor him. This later turned into a Festschrift book titled Theory: A Generation (Liao 2020) which publicly gave Liao Chao-yang the position of the pioneer of the theory generation in Taiwan. Another collective endeavor is significant here. In 2019, a Professor of Comparative Literature in UCLA, Shih Shu-mei, along with Liao Chao-yang and two other senior scholars from Chinese literature and sociology, published and edited a book, Keywords of Taiwan Theory (Shih 2019). This project involved 32 scholars from the social sciences and humanities; each one selected and elaborated one concept considered to be important for “Taiwan Theory.” These keywords were—de/fault, molecular translation, anthropomorphism, order of literary form, justice, chiasma (chiasm, chiasme), occupy, embodied image, merman, settler, knowledge from below, frontier, post-war, reassembling, political metaphysics, reversal, radical 2.0, interface, ambivalence, semiotic syncretism, Sino-corporeality, Sinophone, transcendence, resilience, drifting, fu, queer, imitation, ghosting, rumor cinema, bad architecture, and translander. Interestingly, zhu-ti-xing/subjectivity is absent.

4 She divided the indigenization movement in Taiwan into three periods: (1) the period of “anti-Japan” (1895-); (2) the period of “anti-westernization” (1945-); (3) the period of “anti-Chinese” (1983).

5 In his book, Formosa Betrayed, George Kerr, an expert on Taiwan issues in the US Defense Intelligence Agency, claims that the idea of the independence of Taiwan was born in his mind in 1942. Kerr argues for the independence of Taiwan or for Taiwan first becoming a trust territory of the US and then having an independence referendum (26).

6 The association of “Taiwan” with bei-qing, meaning sadness, started with a film A City of Sadness (bei-qing-cheng-shi) (1989) directed by Hou Hsiao-hsien. The movie was about the common people’s lives under martial law. The movie became famous after it won the Golden Lion award at the Venice Film Festival. Bei-qing was an uncommon poetic compound word that captured the mood of the time well. This term was later used negatively to describe the political taciturnity of the DPP. Since the late 1980s, the DPP has achieved several successes in local elections. During election campaigns, the DPP often mobilized the people’s victimhood. Bei-qing became the mood of the politics of the Taiwanese. Quite often, protests and large campaign rallies were conducted like funerals. The opposition accused the DPP of performing too much bei-qing.

7 One of the confusing parts of the debates was around the question of traitors. The image of traitors, han-jian, has been invoked often in debates about unification versus independence. The Chinese, particularly leftists, were often suspicious of the political motives of the pro-independence Taiwanese. The word jian means adultery, so han-jian has additional sexual implications. LCY criticized pro-unification people like Chen Chao-ying and LHH. He thought that they felt contempt towards the Taiwanese for their love of the Japanese colonizer as if they were women victims who loved their rapists. This criticism muddled the discussions. The concerned parties accused each other of having this kind of attitude of witch-hunting and both denied the criticism. LHH said “to me, han-jain is not a meaningful term […] my concern is anti-colonialism” (H. Liao 1995b, 100). He also asserted that his position was against male chauvinism. He transferred it back to LCY; it was LCY who was imagining tai-traitors as having an adulterous relationship with China. LCY on the other hand, thought that all these imaginary traitors are the consequence of not able to remove the “content”: the dichotomy between bad people and good people.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Hsing-Wen Chang

Hsing-Wen Chang is a Cultural Studies scholar and a practitioner of psychoanalysis with a Lacanian orientation. She acquired her first PhD in Cultural Studies from the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society (CSCS), Bangalore. She is doing her second PhD in Psychology at Ambedkar University, Delhi. Her research interests are psychoanalysis, political subjectivity, social movement, feminism and critical theory. She has published several papers on trauma, subjectivity and translation in Chinese, French and English.